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Friday, March 3, 2017

Wachowski Reloaded, Part 5: The Matrix Ephemera

Part 5, in which we expand into video games, comics and animation...

When
the Wachowskis got the go-ahead to finish out the trilogy they had anticipated
making following The Matrix’s
success, they decided that they weren’t merely going to make a second movie and
then a third after that. Their plans for the franchise extended far beyond what
most film trilogies of the day settled for, with not only an extensive plan to
shoot Reloaded and Revolutions back-to-back, but to extend
the story beyond the films and create a mixed-media experience that would
encompass various tie-ins and expand the scope of the world in ways that other
franchises had yet to dream of. Thus, 2003 was dubbed the “Year of the Matrix,”
and the Wachowskis set their sights not just on film, but animation and video
games as well. In hindsight, maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that the
sequels didn’t quite cut the mustard, due to the siblings’ attention being
pulled in so many directions at once, but it’s as I’ve always said: I’d much
rather see artists reach for the stars and fall flat on their face than sit
back and play it safe. Movie tie-ins were nothing new at the time of the
sequels’ release, but connecting them all together to tell the same story in
unison was quite revolutionary at the time, and such practices predate our
current Hollywood landscape where TV shows and movies intersect and shared
universes are all the rage.

The
first shot out of the gate was an animated short released in front of every
print of the completely forgettable Dreamcatcher,
“Final Flight of the Osiris.” Written by the Wachowskis themselves and produced
by the same studio who made that equally-forgettable animated Final Fantasy movie, the short kicked
off what would be a whole series later compiled into an anthology film and
dubbed The Animatrix. Anime had been
one of the chief influences upon the style of the first film, and so there was
the idea to recruit Japanese animators and produce a handful of shorts set in
the world they in part had helped to inspire. Released intermittently online
and elsewhere before finally coming out as a DVD feature after Reloaded’s premiere, The Animatrix is like other anthology films in that it’s a bit of a
mixed bag, with some impressive shorts mixed in with some considerably less so,
but they all produce a unique vision with these little side stories taking
place in the Wachowskis’ sandbox. The siblings wrote a handful of the shorts
themselves, and those segments provide a unique perspective to the films when
watched alongside them.

“Final
Flight of the Osiris” contains the most direct connection, as its story proves
to be the catalyst that starts the plot of the sequels. It tells of the doomed
crew of the Osiris and their
last-ditch mission to get the message of the machines’ coming invasion to Zion
in time. The short is fine, but seems to exist largely as a stylistic exercise
that would prepare audiences for what to expect in the sequels, that otherwise
doesn’t leave much of an impression (aside from the “realistic” animation, that
carries with it that sort of Polar
Express, dead-eyed creepiness). Much more successful is the two-part
“Second Renaissance,” which winds up being a crucial storyline that colors and
informs the one told by the movies. Adapting a comic story that the Wachowskis
did with concept designer Geof Darrow, “The Second Renaissance” goes back and
tells the story of the machines and how they came to start using humans as an
energy source. Through this short, we get the sort of wild visuals I’d hoped
would be more prominent in the movies, such as the robot horseman of Death and
massive robotic armies. More importantly, the shorts provide the machine’s
perspective on the conflict, and we get to see that they were once the
oppressed fighting against their human masters, and all of a sudden the story
is evolved from a simple good vs. evil parable into something far more
interesting, and we can see the cycle of violent, unchecked revolution carry
itself out from one generation to the next.

The
final segment the Wachowskis contributed to the anthology is “Kid’s Story,” a
short whose primary goal seems to be introducing a seemingly major character
for the new films. The short on its own is a nice, quiet little character
piece, but considering the annoying Kid went on to do a whole lot of nothing in
the movies (seriously: fuck the Kid), it takes on a feeling of
inconsequentiality when viewed now, after-the-fact. The Animatrix itself went on to have a large influence, with
several later blockbusters getting their own DTV animated prequels and sequels
(anyone else remember Chronicles of Riddick:
Dark Fury or Van Helsing: The London
Assignment?), another sign of the Wachowskis being constantly ahead of the
curve.

Not
content to just contract their world and characters out to legendary Japanese
animators, the Wachowskis’ elaborate multi-media plan also included a video game
that would not be some quickie tie-in, but tell another story between the
frames, featuring side characters Niobe and Ghost and what they were up to
during the events of Reloaded
concurrent to Neo, Morpheus and Trinity’s storyline. Featuring a script and
live-action scenes shot specifically for the game by the siblings, Enter the Matrix promised to be a video game like no other. The
Wachowskis were geeks, subsisting off a steady diet of comics, movies and video
games, and thus oversaw the entire production of the game to ensure it would be enough to
satisfy the needs of the gamer audience. The actors performed motion capture
for their game avatars, and the fight choreography was ripped right from the
movies, what with their Yuen Woo-ping-directed moves and slow-motion gameplay.
Couple that with the game’s interconnectivity with the movie, and the results
could have been revolutionary, for both games and films.

What
we actually got, however, was a rushed product filled with glitches and
highly-repetitive, not-terribly-original gameplay. Max Payne had already introduced the concept of “bullet-time” to
shooter gameplay a few years previous, where players could slow time to
actually dodge bullets and shoot their enemies in real-time, but Enter the Matrix did little to improve
upon those basic mechanics, which were already old by the time the game came
out. The connections to the movie are novel, and provide viewers who have
played the game with a sort of “secret club” mentality, where they could see
the hidden connections between scenes and characters, but there’s little in the
way of important story information. You might play the game to see how, say,
the Oracle is transformed from Gloria Foster to Mary Alice, or to find out that
Ghost has a thing for Trinity, among other little odds and ends, but such
scenes play more as trivia rather than crucial story information.

The
next game was The Matrix Online, an
MMO taking place after the events of the last movie, with the machines and
humanity entered into an uneasy peace, but where new adventures could be had.
If we see the Matrix trilogy as it
was originally intended, where the last movie is meant to have a transcendent
level of audience-participation after being introduced and inducted to the
various layers of the world, then it is entirely appropriate that the story’s
future be left in the hands of the audience. Thus, the Wachowskis seemed done with
the trilogy, but there was one final itch they had to scratch: gamer nerds
wanted to play as their white savior, kung fu Jesus, and that’s where The Path of Neo comes in. Once again
written and directed by the siblings, The
Path of Neo allows players to step into the shoes of the One himself and
relive all their favorite scenes from the movie, featuring clips from the whole
franchise recut into techno-beat montages, with some notable additions to the
story not found in any of the other ephemera. As a game, The Path of the One plays much like the disappointing Enter the Matrix, with rushed and
glitch-y game mechanics (it was not uncommon to find yourself shooting an enemy
thirty feet away when trying to punch one right in front of you), but as a
concept, The Path of Neo offers a lot
to savor. Several missions feature level designs film nerds will find familiar:
there’s an underground cavern similar to the one found in Enter the Dragon, a level where you must fend off a bunch of
hatchet-wielding thugs with a bamboo staff much like Jackie Chan did in Drunken Master II, a
black-and-white samurai segment recalling Kurosawa and Kobayashi, a
gun-training level taking place in the tea-house from Hard-Boiled, later levels with design based on the work of MC
Escher… it’s the kind of wild versatility of genre that’s missing from the
sequels, and even though the game itself isn’t as sharp as it should be, it makes
for an interesting companion-piece to the rest of the series.

At
the center of it all are the Wachowskis, the architects of this whole
wild,
messy, amazing and comprehensive experience that goes beyond film and
into the
interconnected world of transmedia. That splitting of focus sectioned
into so
many directions may help explain why the franchise they wrought went
spiraling
out of control (and somewhat against the anti-corporate,
anti-comforts-of-the-material-world feel that was so crucial to the
series’ story in the first place),
but it was a massive endeavor to be commended in how it was even allowed
to
exist in the first place. With the creation and expansion of the Matrix franchise, I don’t know if the
Wachowskis took over the world… but, for a hot minute there, they sure came
close.